“I wanted to stop and wish you well on your new journey.”
Blinking, Charlotte couldn’t remember in the three years that she’d worked at the hospital having Agatha say one pleasant word. “Thank you!”
The older woman started to step away, but she stopped, giving Charlotte a smile. “You’re a very skilled nurse. If you decide you’d like to come back, I’m sure we can find a place for you here in the ER.”
Charlotte had to mentally shake herself.
Although she’d miss her work family, she hoped she’d meet new friends.
And she remembered this the next morning when she took the cab to the apartment building where she’d grown up.
A familiar feeling of butterflies erupted inside her stomach as she was time machined back to the child who’d been awakened by a caseworker in the middle of the night and asked to pack her belongings in a trash bag because she was being taken away from home. The next events of that night and why she had been whisked away were all a blur, but she recalled how they’d driven for what seemed like hours until they pulled up in front of the apartment building where she’d call home for the next eleven years.
The caseworker, a pretty brunette with glasses, had come around to the passenger seat and told Charlotte not to be scared. She would be staying with her aunt Lucy. Clinging to her stuffed toy, a brown bear with a missing eye and rip in the belly, Charlotte had walked up the sidewalk in her dirty, untied tennis shoes to meet a relative she’d never met before.
Twenty years had passed, but the memories remained.
Asking the driver to wait, she slipped him a twenty, then climbed out from the backseat and made her way up that same long sidewalk and in through the double glass doors that had spider cracks from corner to corner.
The lobby smelled like mildew and musk, a smell that Charlotte didn’t think she’d ever escape. Every time she smelled it, she jetted back to her childhood when she feared her own shadow. She’d been wary of everyone, unsure of who to trust or who to care for. Her patients had taken the place for the things she lacked in her personal life.
Up the stairs, she stepped over old man Hagley who was passed out. She took the empty bottle from his hand, set it aside, then continued up to the fifth floor and to the door at the end of the hall. Two seventeen. The seven had been turned upside down since Charlotte came that first day.
Inside, she looked around the cluttered apartment with a sigh of despair. Her aunt had a hoarding issue, as well a few other flaws. Magazines stacked as high as Charlotte was tall and filled trash bags piled into a mound cluttered the small space. A permanent odor hung in the air that came from many sources. The smoke-saturated curtains hung haphazardly from bent rods. The coffee stained blue and white linoleum floor had more holes than swiss cheese. The faux leather chair had peeled down to the netting. Charlotte smiled at the memory of how she and Lucy had dragged the secondhand chair from the dumpster, up the five flights of stairs and stuck it in their apartment. When Charlotte had complained, Lucy had given her the go-to lecture, “Stop being so selfish. Until you have a job of your own and pay the bills then you’ll come off that hoity-toity attitude and do what’s best. Remember I was the one who took you in when your mom didn’t want you.” As if she needed reminding…
Charlotte would never forget the humiliation on that Christmas morning, the ridicule of the neighbors watching as she and Lucy hauled the chair away as if it was a prized possession. How the kids had laughed at and bullied Charlotte when she returned to school, calling her “Trashy Charlotte”. Months had passed, but felt like years, before they found someone else to pick on.
Even dumpster diving wasn’t as humiliating as being responsible for going down to the corner bar for two a.m. pickups. It never failed that Lucy would drink herself under the bar and the bartender would call for someone to come get her. Charlotte would get scared walking the dark streets in the middle of the night so at fifteen she switched things up and started driving the beat up silver two door that had spongy brakes the few blocks to get her drunk aunt.
If only Charlotte could count the number of men that had come and gone over the years—all the “uncles” she’d met. Those memories had been tattooed into every brain cell as a constant reminder that one day she’d be better. She’d be a better mother when she had kids of her own.
Charlotte could only wonder how horrible her mother was that family court thought living with Lucy would be a healthier environment.
In Lucy’s defense, she’d never been abusive and kept a roof over their heads and meals on the table, at least most of the time.
Movement caught her eye.
She picked up a magazine off the top of a stack and rolled it, smashing the cockroach against the wall. She tossed it into the trash and started to put the magazine back when she gave it a toss too.
Glancing around the clutter, she gave her head a little shake. She wouldn’t miss this place. The day she’d moved out, working two jobs to help pay for nursing school and a small one room apartment close to campus, had been a liberating moment. Several curve balls had been thrown her way in adulthood, delaying her graduation by a few years, but she’d finally managed to graduate with honors. Learning to work through the past, it got sloppy at times, but she did day by day.
Charlotte had given up on trying
